NimbleTV: Another Start-up Ready to Give You TV Everywhere

Everybody's doing it.

A new TV Everywhere-oriented start-up, NimbleTV, begins beta-testing its service in New York City on Monday. One question about this new bid to give TV junkies an easy, anytime fix is will they be sued like Aereo? After all, as Brian Stelter reports in his Times article about NimbleTV, the services have a few similarities:

…NimbleTV is like Aereo, the start-up backed by Barry Diller’s company IAC that repackages broadcast channels like NBC and Fox into a streaming service for $12 a month. As Aereo started letting customers in New York City sign up last month, virtually all of the city’s broadcasters filed lawsuits against the company, citing copyright infringements. The suits are pending and Aereo is online for now.

That said, NimbleTV chief exec Anand Subramanian told Mr. Stelter that his service has taken great care to not break any laws. Users of NimbleTV would still pay their original service–cable providers like Xfinity or satellite distributors such as Dish Network–while NimbleTV wants only to provide a way to view a given package of channels via the Internet for maybe $20 a month.

Mr. Stelter reports investors in the service still think they’ll be sued. If that isn’t tough enough, NimbleTV joins a growing crowd of TV Everywhere pretenders to throne besides Aereo, like Skitter. Skitter is only available in Portland, Oregon at the moment but as the streaming TV market begins to open, the first companies to hit the market may be the most well-positioned to profit.

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